While 16-24s lead the way only on YouTube (32%), Instagram (39%) and Tumblr (45%), the 25-34 age group are ahead for all of the rest, including on big players such as Google+ (31%), Twitter (31%) and Facebook (29%).

Facebook is actually the most popular social network on the planet among teens with 59% more active teen users than the nearest competitor, YouTube (35.4% of 16 to 19 year olds). Twitter is a distant third with 30.1% of 16 to 19 year olds around the world using it on a monthly basis.

When it comes to referral traffic from social networks, it is no surprise that Facebook is the undisputed no. 1. According to Shareaholics, 10% of the traffic on websites from 200,000 publishers comes from the world's largest social network.

Simplifying Facebook Ads – The suite of Facebook ad types were significantly reduced to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to navigate the self-serve ad platform.

Introduction of Hashtags – One of the most talked about changes made in 2013. Facebook introduced hashtags to help categorise conversations and make the search function more useful

Videos on Instagram – Although this change wasn’t specifically made to Facebook, Instagram is owned by Facebook and has made integration between the services a priority. Many people viewed this change as a response to popular short-form video platform Vine.

Farewell EdgeRank, hello new algorithm – Page managers prided themselves on understanding EdgeRank which helped determine how much visibility a post would received within the Facebook news feed. Facebook canned EdgeRank in favour of a new algorithm which takes more than 1,000 factors in to account when assessing its popularity and value in the news feed.

Quality content gets rewarded – Just after the algorithm change was announced, Facebook also instructed users to create better quality content to get more out of the algorithm change.

The top 8 of sharing platforms and apps is Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram.

The best way to "go viral" is to engage millions of users, each of them sharing through small networks.

In general, social networks are made up of curators and creators, as 46% of adult internet users share content created by themselves, while 41% take photos or videos that they have found online and repost them. Of course, there are also those who do both curating and creating.

Social media sharing became the second most important factor in search engine rankings, surpassed only by strong content

86% of people say they are bothered by the need to create new accounts on websites

77% responded that social login is "a good solution that should be offered by any site"